Thursday, May 19, 2011

Somewhere along the way I decided that I wanted to be "crafty" with my wedding. This was all well and good until I remembered the size of my guest list, but luckily I've got some lovely ladies in my life who have been more than helpful with all my crazy schemes.

First scheme. Save the Dates.

I started making these about a week ago with my friend and bridesmaid Stacey, but we spent most of the session coming up with the design and color arrangement. So this saturday my little sister flew down from New York to finish them up with me (as well as handle other maid-of-honor duties).

It took us about half a season of TrueBlood, but we managed to get all the save-the-dates done in one evening. She stamped, I addressed, and we still liked each other at the end of the day.

Here I am at about 12pm after destroying my living room and going on our second mysterious coffee company run. There you can see one of my traditional working faces. The other one is with my tongue hanging out and is decidedly less attractive. Yes, Readers, I confess. I am a tongue sticker-outer when I sew, but since I was only addressing I used my head tapping lip puckering concentration face.

The save the dates weren't overly complicated. I hit the craft store and picked out a few different stamps that I liked. One batch of letters, one pack of swirls and a nifty humming bird stamp that caught my eye. I used three different colors of ink in three different textures. One metallic gold stamp pad, one goldish chalk texture pad, and a little kid's washable yellow ink. All the other yellows I found just were not bright enough so I'm just praying that no one gets these wet because that ink is going to run.

Interesting fact. Briana loved stamps when she was kid. As a result she has excellent stamping skills. No missing pieces just good solid stamp lines 97% of the time. Best of all she works for free.

In any case the next step was to get some paper. I picked up some index card weight paper at the office supply store, designed the postcard face and printed them out. We went with post cards mainly for economy's sake. The stamps were cheaper ($0.44 - $0.28 x a ton of cards =savings!) and I didn't need to purchase envelopes. I managed to make each save the date cost me $0.63 including the postage. The cheapskate frugal gal in me did the happy money saved dance. Now I can afford to spend a little more on formal invitations which is great because I really want to have foiling or raised gold lettering.

This is about the time Briana's stamping arm was ready to give out.

So we took a coffee break. In case you are wondering it was delicious and energizing and that definitely had nothing to do with the two shots of espresso I had them add.

And ended up with these. Over 100 Save the dates, all hand stamped and hand addressed. I feel very accomplished. I'm also really happy with them. Simple, in my colors, cheap, and special because we made them ourselves.

Best of all is the color of the bird matches the flowers our florist picked out for us.

These roses were huge! 3 inches across at least. I would have brought more flowers home, but everything else in the bouquets are not in season. It was really important to me that we used fall flowers since that's my favorite season for flowers. And speaking of flowers I'll have to post some pictures of my Georgia flower garden. Just for the record you can totally plant things in red clay and somehow they grow.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

So if you follow my facebook or twitter feeds you'll already know that Mr. Fiance and I were invited to a Halfway to Halloween party tomorrow night.

So if you're in the Atlanta area you should totally stop by and say hello to us. Just saying.

As you can imagine there is not enough time to make new costumes for tomorrow so I'm busting out our Logan's Run costumes again. I wasn't completely happy with Mr. Fiance's Logan costume last time around so tonight I'll make some adjustments.

Here's a photo of us from last October.

Over all I was satisfied with the costumes. I was very happy with the mock turtleneck undershirt, but I thought the tunic was off. When I made the tunic Mr. Fiancé was unavailable for measurements so I traced one of Mr. Fiancé's teeshirts to make the tunic pattern. I didn't take into account where the shoulders were going to lay and thus this happened.

Poofy Poof Mc Poofyshoulders. Luckily it only needs some minor adjustments. I just need to take in the shoulder lines a little bit like such:

And adjust the neckline like so:

Cake. No problem. Just a few quick snips and some blind hem stitches and we'll be good to go.

As far as the Jessica Dress I really only need to redo the belt. I'll swing by the hardware store this afternoon and see if I can't find any 2 inch silver O-rings. I had originally ordered 3 inch rings but they were way too big. I had thought the 3inch referred to the total size of the ring, not the opening. I still think it normally does, but I bought my rings off etsy and I suspect the seller was a little confused.

My Stacey, what nice boobies you have.

I ended up tossing out two of the rings and making the belt with three rings rather than the five rings used in the movie.

Three rings in front, two larger rings in back.

I also need to reinforce the inside of the belt with a stronger fabric so that it can actually support the rings. I'm not going to lie... the last time I wore this costume one of the rings popped off and another was barely hanging on by the end of the night. So I figure I'll either shove some interfacing in there or a piece of scrap flannel depending on what I've got lying around the house.

All in all I suspect it will take me a couple hours to complete the miner alterations. I'll update you on how I jury rigged everything afterwards. I briefly contemplated getting us some fabulous wigs for tomorrow night, but meh. I'll save that for Dragoncon.

And hey, if you think you might make it out tomorrow send me a line or leave a comment and I'll make sure to look for you at the event.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

A few quick changes today. As you'll note I took down the old $25 Vintage logo and wrote in the words Bomber Girl. This is mostly because my Bomber Girl logo design looks like this thus far:

I'm thinking the new name will also make this blog a great place to show off some of my pin-up drawings among other things... because seriously who doesn't have 12 sketchbooks full of pinups hidden away in their closet from my first year post-animation school? I mean right? Right? And what better place to put them then in my blog posts, right? (Read: I am so loving the freedom my new blog title is giving me.)

But back to the topic of today's post. As I believe I've stated before I am from New York. More specifically I am from the Hudson River Valley, New York. In the entire 22 years of life I spent in the Hudson River Valley we never even really mentioned tornadoes. It just wasn't in the local vocab. Tornadoes in that valley mostly don't exist. Every once in a while one jumps over a mountain and does a little damage, but the last time that happened I was in the third grade and didn't even notice what was going on.

This week however.... well, lets just say I had a serious scare. We knew there were going to be bad storms that night with a possibility of tornadoes. We were under a tornado warning from about 8pm onward, but it really didn't even start to rain until close to 10:45pm that night. It was a pretty nasty night. Very windy, lots of lightning, and our backyard started to flood about 25 minutes into the storm.

At about 11:15pm and I was upstairs brushing my teeth when our tornado sirens went off. Would you all laugh at me if I told you I didn't even know what a tornado siren sounded like before last Wednesday? Mr. Fiancé who was downstairs at the time yelled at me to get downstairs immediately. I spit out what I could of my toothpaste (but didn't have time to rinse, bleh) and zipped downstairs as fast as I was capable of.

I landed at the bottom of the stairs and Mr. Fiancé essentially threw me into the downstairs bathtub, laid down on top of me, and pulled the guest room mattress over us. I think all this occurred in under three minutes, but as we hid in the tub Mr. Fiancé could hear the sounds of a tornado outside. I couldn't really hear anything from under the mattress, but I'm told tornadoes sound a bit like freight trains.

We stayed in the tub until about midnight and I still had a mouth full of toothpaste that I ended up having to swallow. I placed a call to my parents at some point to get storm information and we occasionally got updates from Mr. Fiancé's mother about where there had been tornado touchdowns. All in all we had two miner touchdowns within five miles of our house. One was just up the road.

We eventually crawled out of the bathtub (a might bit stiff I should add) and stayed up for another two hours in case of more tornadoes, but it was just rain, thunder and hail for the rest of the evening. We finally ended up sleeping in the downstairs bedroom since our master bedroom is on the second floor. In the morning we were finally able to get a good idea of what had happened the night before. Our neighborhood, thankfully, was not damaged by the storms. We had some downed limbs and lots of debris laying about, but I consider us to be very lucky. Even my newly planted flower garden survived unharmed. Some of our neighbors were not so fortunate.

One of my co-worker's parents lost two cars and had some damage to their home home in Griffin, GA. He shared some pictures of the aftermath with me. Thankfully no one in his family was hurt.

I'm sure you've all heard the stories about the death toll throughout the southeast. There are many tragic stories coming out of the region. Georgia applied for and was granted a federal state of emergency and there are several FEMA offices opening in the region tomorrow. I'm so grateful and thankful for everyone that remained safe from the storms and my heart goes out to those who lost their loved ones.

Monday, May 2, 2011

What's next at BomberGirl (formerly $25V) you ask? Well here's a little preview of what I've been working on. I've also got some other costumes in the works including this year's dragoncon costumes. If you're a member of the facebook group you will know that my life has been one crazy bit on insaneness after another. I won't go through all the details, but if you're interested you can stop over there for a look. I've missed you all very much, Readers, and I hope you'll continue to stick with me now that I can actually begin the switch over to the new server.